How Cognitive Psychology Misunderstands Moral Intuitions
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
Recent work in cognitive psychology suggests that many, if not most, of our deontological intuitions do not provide epistemic access to normative truths, as deontologists allege. Instead, such intuitions distort our access to normative truth, according to psychologists like Joshua Greene. Greene maintains that deontological intuitions are affectively-charged reactions to non-moral factors—for example, the extent to which the agent is “up-close-and-personal” to the person he intends to harm or help. I argue, however, that this line of argument depends on moral intuitions that are themselves not subject to distortions of their own. I present a case that, while on its surface appears to support consequentialist reasoning, distorts our epistemic access to normative truth in parallel to the intuitions Greene discusses. The case I introduce explores what the psychologist Schelling (1968) calls the “identifiable victim effect,” according to which subjects appear to be highly sensitive to the determinacy of potential beneficiaries: subjects exhibit higher rates of beneficence when potential beneficiaries are determinate prior to acting than when potential beneficiaries are determinate only after acting. I discuss recent experiments conducted by social psychologists Small & Loewenstein (2003) that corroborate these findings. Critics of deontology argue that intuition supports the view that determinacy itself bears no moral weight, while deontology appears committed to t!
he independent value of determinacy. Since subjects routinely place moral weight on determinacy, support for deontology seems fundamentally distorted. But I show there are independent reasons for supporting the idea that determinacy can make a moral difference. Intuitions in this case can be epistemically calibrated.
